Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization [...]

This article discusses recent research into encoding short 100 word messages into the DNA of living organisms. The error-correcting characteristics of DNA enable such messages to be passed down without degrading across generations. By embedding short messages into hardy organisms such as particular strains of bacteria, it may be possible to preserve information over longer [...]

I’ve been thinking a bit about how the GUI for computer desktops could be improved so that it is possible to have more information available without cluttering the screen with windows and folders etc. One approach that is kind of interesting is to think of the desktop as a sphere instead of a plane. You [...]

Today I read this nice article which provides a short consumer-friendly overview of the history of the Digital Physics paradigm. Digital Physics is not mainstream physics — but it is growing and someday could become huge. It brings together computer scientists and physicists in an interdisciplinary approach to physics. While many advocates simply take the [...]

Japanese researchers have developed a technology for the remote control of humans. Hmm… sounds kind of creepy. The system uses weak electrical stimulation of the vestibular system, causing the subject to shift balance and change direction. This technology can also be used to create vestibular illusions — for example, it can be used to make [...]

I’ve been following the drama of the stranded Russian mini-sub. One of the main problems is that they have limited oxygen, which doesn’t give the rescue team much time to retrieve the sub. This got me thinking and I came up with a simple idea that could make all submarines safer: Every submarine should have [...]

I just read that a Japanese team is actually developing technology to store data in human fingernails. I proposed this concept on this blog last year in this  post.   That may qualify as prior art. I wonder if they are going to try to patent this? Not that I mind, I think it’s a great [...]

I’ve been thinking about different types of communities recently. Two forms of community that are often discussed are "communities of interest" where the members share a common set of interests (e.g. a community of people interested in Japanese culture), and "communities of practice" where the members share a common set of skills (e.g. a community [...]

by Nova Spivack, Minding the Planet, http://www.mindingtheplanet.net This news article reports that the FBI is investigating a situation in which mobsters deliberately contaminated their drug money with a virus in order to deter in-house theft by members of their organization. Several years ago, during the days of collective paranoia following 9-11, I started thinking about [...]

Here’s an interesting speculation. Assume for the moment that our universe is in fact a simulation running on a vast computing system created a race of beings that is far more advanced than we can presently imagine. The next logical question would be, “Why would an advanced civilization want or need to undertake such a [...]

The Ontology Problem is a fundamental challenge of the emerging Semantic Web. This problem is comprised of three key sub-problems, the Upper Ontology Problem, the Domain Ontology Problem, and the Ontology Integration Problem, described in detail below:

If you’ve ever tried writing a business plan, you know what a chore it is to locate statistics about industries, markets and products. While there are many market research firms that charge huge sums for their reports on particular segments, one quickly realizes that the wide degree of variance in their statistics means that just [...]

In August of 2003, I posted an article that suggested the SETI folks ought to look at our own DNA to see if there happens to be a hidden message from aliens in there waiting to be discovered. Putting a message in human DNA, particularly in the junk DNA regions, is guaranteed (a) not to [...]

A GoMeme is a specially modified piece of content that spreads virally along social relationships in a manner that benefits every site that helps it spread. Any piece of content can be transformed into a GoMeme.

by Nova Spivack Originally published on July 28, 2004; Updated on October 10, 2011 http://novaspivack.com Should there be a Constitutional Separation of Corporation and State? Today our American democracy faces a new threat to its integrity, a threat even greater than terrorism in the long-term. This threat is the corporation. In this essay I propose [...]

by Nova Spivack, http://www.novaspivack.com Original: July 8, 2004 Revised: February 5, 2005; February 28, 2010 (Permission to reprint or share this article is granted, with a citation to this Web Page: http://www.novaspivack.com/science/a-physics-of-ideas-measuring-the-physical-properties-of-memes) This paper provides an overview of a new approach to measuring the physical properties of ideas as they move in real-time through information [...]

Forget about DRM and legal action to prevent piracy — there is a better way: Superdistribution harnesses basic human drives to save money and make money. It’s more powerful than copy protection, more powerful than ethical arguments, and more powerful even than fear of legal prosecution. A recent article points out that in 2003 around [...]

Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers) Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net) INTRODUCTION This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater. DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE The Semantic [...]

Here is a cool new kind of complex system I am thinking about a lot that we might call a “network-automaton” or a “graph automaton” — a system that evolves networks (graphs) over time. This rule is similar to cellular automata rules such as the famous “Life” rule discovered by John Conway, however instead of computing [...]

This is a very good article on the physics of scale-free networks such as the Web. Lately I have been getting increasingly interested in graph theory and also in knot theory. There is a similarity between networks and knots and it should be possible to do a mapping such that the theorems and algorithms of knot [...]

I call it a Lifelog — Nokia calls it a “Lifeblog” (my terminology is better) — but it’s the same idea — a log of all the stuff you experience — your whole life, blogged and online. OK but the key is to make sure I can keep my lifeblog private — or at least [...]

One of the big changes that will be enabled by the coming Metaweb is the shift from application-centric computing to data-centric computing. As the Metaweb evolves, information will be imbued with increasingly sophisticated metadata. HTML provides metadata about formatting and links. XML provides metadata about structure and behavior. RDF, RDFS and OWL provide metadata about [...]

This article discusses new research in how the brain makes buying decisions and other choices — what is now called “neuromarketing”. Neuromarketing researchers seek to discover, and influence, the neurological forces at work inside the mind of potential customers. According to the article, most decisions are made subconsciously and are not necessarily rational at all [...]

I am having an interesting conversation with Howard Bloom, author, memeticist, historian, scientist, and social theorist. We have been discussing network models of the universe and the underlying “metapatterns” that seem to unfold at every level of scale. Below is my reply to his recent note, followed by his note which is extremely well written [...]

Hello all, I have been thinking about the general problems of social networks on the Internet. It occurs to me that these issues are closely related to digital physics. For more on digital physics see the work of Ed Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, Norman Margolus, Tomasso Toffoli, and other pioneers of the field of cellular automata. [...]

I was goofing around in Google Groups today, looking up ancient conversations I had in USENET in the long gone days of the 1990′s and I came across a quote of mine which is “I don’t care how many levels of reality you posit, as soon as you posit even one, it’s turtles all the [...]

Here’s a wildly unexpected proposal that just popped into my brain: Humanity should intentionally contaminate Mars with Earth lifeforms — as soon as possible! The benefits vastly outweigh any concerns to the contrary. Indeed, it may be the smartest thing our species ever does. The first obvious benefit is that it will get Earth life [...]

A new article projects that global warming will eliminate up 1 million species by 2050 — up to nearly 40% of all species. Combine that with the vast number of species that are being wiped out because of human activity (industrialization, elimination of habitats, pollution, over-fishing, etc.) and we are on the brink of losing [...]

In previous articles on this Weblog I have suggested that we name the new evolution of the Web that is emerging from the confluence of Weblogging and RSS, “The Metaweb.” The Metaweb is a meta-data driven Web of microcontent. We can see it emerging and chart its growth by looking at technorati and daypop for [...]

Originally developed at Netscape, a new technology called RSS has risen from the dead to ignite the next-evolution of the Net. RSS represents the first step in a major new paradigm shift — the birth of “The Metaweb.” The Metaweb is the next evolution of the Web — a new layer of the Web in [...]